After listening to Shelton lament the end of nightingales, kindness, bucolic, the use of the word crepuscular, and a "day in the country," my students wrote for five or so minutes on "What ever happened to....?" Simply, begin the sentence with "What ever happened to...?" (as Shelton begins his short) and follow the trail, see where it takes you. If you get stuck, simply come back to "and what ever happened to....?"
Without fail, wow. Every time we write together and share this exercise I am reminded of how it must have been before TV, before radio, before movies and I-things. Perhaps it is a bit like the days of the wandering poets... the days of the oral tradition where we went door-to-door, (village to village? hut to hut? ocean to desert?) reciting all the days news in the form of a song. The raw uninhibited form of storytelling that was freely given, until we discovered that words could be bound and sold (whatever happened to unbound words...?).
I suppose I am reminded of "the good old days" (what ever happened to the good old days?) when we sat around the davenport and told stories and sang camp songs for amusement instead of heading out to places of amusement like coffee houses where we isolate ourselves on facebook (whatever happened to talking to people at the coffee shop?). In any case, by the time class was almost over, I was, rather unprofessionally, begging my students to read their responses.
"See?" I pointed out in a teacherly fashion (though I have no idea if it was teacherly factual!) "This is what it used to be like! Back when we had to commission writers to write up their most beautiful thoughts and musings! Please, please read!"
A few other students chimed in, lending their support. "Yeah! Come on! Read! You heard about our weird childhoods!"
When we respond to this prompt, something magical happens. We go places. We see decades and details we have never seen. We meet other mothers, cars, states, fishing holes and middle-of-nowhere restaurants. We get on the page with rare insects, the sounds of another country, language, century... We meet each other's uncles and doggies. We learn about teenage soccer in England, Anti-I-Over, One-Two-Three O'Leary, We see fireflies and long gone utensils of the kitchen. We see the stories within the everyday objects and times of day. And clothing... we see clothing. And dancing. And church. And...
So please, I can hardly stand it. What is your version of "What ever happened to..." As always, just follow the energy and see where it goes... you won't know before you write it. You may have some vague ideas, but when you meet yourself on the page with this one, you are in for some nostalgia of the holy shit kind. Enjoy. And then share. I'll pay you a quarter.
Whatever happened to backyard burning?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was between about 9 and 12 in the 1960's, one of the jobs every kid did for the family, was to take the burnable trash out to the very back of our big suburban yards and put the accumulation of pizza boxes, cereal boxes, paper, and cardboard waste into a 55 gallon drum and light it on fire. The drum was a brown orange color from all the rust. And every now and then, a Dad would buy a new drum when the old one rusted completely apart. I liked how the rusted sides of the barrel would become very lacy, and you could break it apart, pushing orange rust into the pile of ashes.
I remember doing this job in the snow and the cold. It was pretty dark at supper time in January, and very cold, so when my mom reminded me to go out and burn the trash. I would put on my winter coat, hat, and mittens, and carry the paper grocery bag filled with the trash outside.
I had to take off my mittens to light the match, flipping the cardboard cover open and scraping the match across the strike plate, and watching the flame come alive. I put the match inside the drum far enough so the wind wouldn't blow out the tiny flame. You had to find a corner of an old tissue, or pizza box to catch the flame on, and build up the fire. Kids usually had a stick they used to stir things around a bit, once the fire got going. I liked to wrap a piece of old plastic wrap around my stick and watch the transparent film turn colors and melt on my stick, crumpling like the witch in the Wizard of Oz.
I liked how the fire would warm you up as you stood there and looked up at the black sky, sometimes there were stars, and the smoke curls rose up to meet that endless darkness. Sometimes there were astronauts up there, circling around in the dark. My outside clothes would take on a rich smokiness, like grandma’s cigarettes, and I would carry the smell to school with me until the cold wind knocked it out of the threads.
As I poked the trash around in the fire, I stood facing the house, and I could see my mom inside the yellow light of the kitchen, cooking. I was hungry by then, and it felt good to watch her putting food on the table. Sometimes she would make roast beef with mushroom gravy and mashed potatoes, and canned peas. Dad had a one job his whole career, and he came home from work, at exactly the same time every night.
Sometimes you would see neighbor kids standing at the back of their yards stirring up their fires with sticks. All our yards came together in the backyards, because, we did not have alleys in the suburbs. So there were no cars or anything back there to disturb your thoughts. I got paid a dime or 15 cents at the end of the week for this work. If we did our jobs, we checked them off of a chart that my parents taped to the refrigerator. Dad kept his coins in a plastic coin purse, which would open when he squeezed the edges of the purse. He paid us an allowance so we could learn about jobs and money, although right now, I don’t have a job.
We had a big cornfield down the block from us in those days. And in the spring, when the snow would melt in little rivulets through our backyards, sometimes we would find salamanders by those little wild trickles. The kids in the neighborhood would love it when we found a salamander. A salamander was better than an insect, but not quite like our cats or dogs. They lived in their own special category, which we had not yet learned about in school, although one kid suggested that they were like frogs. We marveled at their moist skin and bulging eyes. I liked how they stared at us, evaluating us silently. I don’t remember anyone ever hurting or acting cruel to a salamander. I remember we put them down gently, sometimes in our window wells, and we watched them waddle away.
The trash burning job was passed down from kid to kid in the family (most families had 4 or 5 kids) until the practice of backyard burning was eventually banned by the various city councils due to the air pollution it created.